Utsunomiya Light Rail HU300Series HU302Formation. Image credit: toyotoki, 28 August 2023, CC-BY-SA-4CC-BY-SA-4.0 Wikimedia Creative Commons.
The first new tramway system in Japan for 75 years opened at the end of August.
The Utsunomiya Light Rail Co Ltd started carrying passengers on its 14.6km line between the city of Utsunomiya, located to the north of Tokyo, and the town, HagaTakanezawa located in Tochigi Prefecture.
Originally expected to open in March 2022, the $467m project was delayed twice due to construction difficulties and a derailment incident which occurred during a trial operation in November 2022. It runs on renewable energy.
The Utsunomiya Municipal government plans to build a 5km extension running west from Utsunomiya station by 2035.
The General Authority for Survey and Geospatial Information (known as GEOSA) has awarded Fugro a contract to conduct a comprehensive survey of Saudi Arabia’s eastern coastline with the primary objective of improving the safety and efficiency of shipping navigation. Covering an area of over 11,000km², Fugro will deploy its highspeed hydrography solution; a combination of airborne lidar bathymetry, vessel-based acoustic methods and advanced processing techniques to acquire and analyse geo-data in compliance with International Hydrographic Organisation standards. These technologies will be deployed by a team of international hydrographic experts, including those with prior experience working on GEOSA contracts. Fugro will partner with IIC Technologies, a specialist in nautical chart creation, to develop the final project deliverables.
HS2 ‘marathon’ bridge construction completed near Lichfield
HS2 has completed a ‘marathon’ construction operation at Streethay near Lichfield. The operation, which utilised the latest low-carbon design, involved excavating 14,000 tonnes of earth, building a 140m retaining wall and moving a 2,600-tonne bridge deck, cast on land adjacent to the railway, 130m into place under the South Staffordshire freight railway.
The work was carried out during a 10-week blockade, with each side of the bridge now backfilled, the rail tracks reinstated. It was completed by HS2’s civils contractor in the West Midlands, Balfour Beatty VINCI, and designers Mott MacDonald as part of a Design Joint Venture with SYSTRA (MMSDJV), together with teams from 18 specialist supply chain companies.
The 25m-long and 18m-wide Streethay overbridge sits within HS2’s Streethay cutting. The next works in this area include two HS2 over bridges running under the A38.
Surviving Crystal Palace Park sculptures preserved with photogrammetric models
Interactive 3D models of the world’s first attempt to model life-size extinct animals, using fossil remains, the 29 surviving Victorian sculptures in Crystal Palace Park in South London, have been launched. The photogrammetric models have been created from multiple digital scans of the famous Grade I listed beasts. The models allow conservators to benchmark their condition, inform repairs, and shape maintenance plans. The scanning and subsequent modelling was undertaken by Historic England’s Geospatial Survey Team, in collaboration with the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs.
The tier one contractor, Buckingham Group collapsed last month blaming 'significant and increasing losses incurred on key sports and leisure contracts due to inflation pressures'. The contractor had owed more than £108m when it collapsed, according to administrators at Grant Thornton. This soars to an estimated £198m, including £4.5m in staff wage claims and £86m of potential bond claims from around 52 uncompleted contracts. However, the rail division and HS2 contract has been sold to Kier Group for £9.6m. In total 445 redundancies were made, with 180 jobs saved.
Plans to construct a storage facility of 37 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in depleted subsea gas fields have been approved by the Netherlands' highest court. The carbon capture project in the Rotterdam port area can go ahead, despite objections by environmental activists. However, it may still not meet European environmental guidelines. Known as the Porthos project, CO2 will be stored in gas fields that were emptied of gas. Thought to reduce the country's annual CO2 emissions by about 2% over the next 15 years.
Renewable energy firm, OX2 has been given a permit to develop a 1.5GW offshore wind farm off the south coast of Sweden. The Triton wind farm, situated 23km off the coast of Skåne, has been granted a Natura 2000 permit. If final approval is given by the government, construction could start in 2027 with power generated by 2030.
The site is one of three projects that OX2 is developing together with the investment arm of Ingka Group (the largest IKEA retail operator), Ingka Investments in Sweden. The two other projects are Galene on the west coast, which was recently approved by the government, and Aurora between the islands Gotland and Öland, which is being prepared by the Gotland County Administrative Board.
Repairs to 18th-century Bubwith bridge reach halfway point
Major repairs to a Grade II listed bridge built in 1798 are progressing on schedule according to the contractor delivering the project, Esh Construction. Delivered on behalf of East Riding of Yorkshire Council, the 15-week scheme involves emergency repair and strengthening works after the stone bridge, which carries the A163 over the River Derwent, was hit by a car in September 2022.
Due to be completed this month, work including masonry repairs with the use of steel staples for additional strength have been completed. The next phase will see the removal of the fill from the eastern and western bridge arches to allow steel anchors and concrete infill to be installed to further strengthen the structure.
A 102,480-acre offshore site in Lake Charles, Louisiana has become the first area in the Gulf of Mexico to have ever been auctioned off as a wind farm. Won by RWE Offshore US Gulf for $5.6m, it has the potential to generate approximately 1.24GW of offshore wind energy and power nearly 435,400 homes with renewable energy.
The new Larivot Bridge project aims to ease traffic on the existing bridge it is being constructed alongside.
The new bridge will carry traffic from Cayenne to Kourou, with a two-way greenway for pedestrians and bicycles.
In a long-running HS2 compulsory purchase dispute the Supreme Court has backed the government's appeal that challenges how landowners are currently compensated when their sites are bought by the state or local authorities. In the Secretary of State for Transport (the appellant) v Curzon Park test-case, the court decided against considering the four separate land areas owned by different landowners individually but rather as a collective. It means compulsory purchases for major infrastructure projects, such as HS2, could cost less in the future, impacting future infrastructure schemes and leading to legislative changes.
Ordnance Survey (OS) has launched new data, including enhancements, in the OS national geographic database. These cover transport – the railway network, path network and the presence of pavements information. It also covers buildings, including a new footprint geometry, with additional information on how buildings are used and its connection to other buildings. Any element of the data is accessible through OS Select+Build and the new OS NGD APIs on the OS Data Hub.
A powerful earthquake has devasted communities in western Morocco.
The 6.8 magnitude quake struck last month approximately 70km southwest of Marrakesh, at a depth of 26km, shaking homes and causing thousands of deaths and widespread damage.
The damage proxy map shown is a NASA Earth Observatory version of a map created by the Earth Observatory of Singapore – Remote Sensing Lab (EOS-RS ) which uses modified Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data processed by the European Space Agency.
Construction on Long Thanh International – Vietnam’s largest airport – is set to begin after VIETUR Consortium, led by Turkey’s IC içtas Construction won the contract for the terminal building following a longer-than-expected search. Due to the cost of $16bn, Long Thanh will initially have the capacity for 25 million passengers a year, rising to more than 100 million following its third phase. A target of 39 months has been given to VIETUR to finish the main terminal.
In brief:
- The Government of Curaçao, a Dutch constituent country, has asked Fugro, developed in alliance with the Netherlands, to map the seabed of the island’s surrounding waters for future development of floating offshore wind farms. The government’s target is to realise 6GW in renewable energy capacity by 2035, which is more than the domestic need for energy, ultimately enabling the production and export of green hydrogen.
- Continuum Industries – an Edinburgh-based AI company whose aim is to accelerate the energy transition of infrastructure developers – has raised $10m in Series A funding in a round led by a European venture capital firm Singular.
- British electronics specialist Filtronic is developing advanced technology that will enable next-generation satellite constellations to deliver high-speed broadband internet coverage. Backed by the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency, the company is working on spacefaring hardware that aims to provide fast, high-capacity links between low-Earth orbiting communications satellites and receiving ground stations.
- Kier Group has joined a Causeway Technologies' project aimed at developing automated, real-time reporting of scope 3 emissions in the construction sector. The initiative sees a software solution that can deliver a verifiable, efficient and scalable way to measure scope 3 emissions in real-time. Other partners in the initiative include Aggregate Industries, Balfour Beatty, Galliford Try, and Morgan Sindall Group.
- A UK/German merger between Aquos Schottel Marine Technologies and Swift Anchors, Schottel Marine Technologies, has been formed focusing on floating renewables.
- GeoAcoustics, in partnership with the University of East Anglia’s school of computing sciences, has been named as a finalist in the category of technical excellence at the national knowledge transfer partnership awards, following the co-development of an AI solution aimed to improve the speed and ease of real-time seabed mapping.